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void*p writes "The Economist is running an article about a computer game developed by Bruno Galantucci, a cognitive scientist at Yale. In the game, two players must find each other in a four-room building by making a single move. The catch is that the players can only communicate using invented symbols. Surprisingly, Galantucci found that teams not only communicated effectively, but also developed startlingly different sets of symbols. Galantucci's 2004 dissertation on the subject (PDF) can be found online."

This experiment is very cool if you've studied generative linguistics. It brings the idea of innate (or universal grammar) into an experimental paradigm. Of course, there are many shortcomings, such as the contrived nature of the symbols and their visual nature, but at its core this experiment could pave the way for all kinds of incredible experiments and perhaps allow cognitive scientists and linguistic syntacticians to have some productive dialogues (surprisingly, they currently don't really do this)...

I was wondering how much existing knowledge/language would influence the outcome. Would people from similar backgrounds be more able to invent useful language than people from different backgrounds? Would certain groups of people, or matches of people end up working together better than others? Male/female differences?

I also got the impression you could probably do morse code with the device though.